Annihilation
A reflection on the unbearable weight of irrevocable loss
“Did you ever love me? Was any of it ever real?”
I ask, but there is never any answer.
I am no longer a man. I am a husk-shaped container of grief.
An ocean of sorrow, of longing, of self-recrimination.
Sometimes, when the stars align, I even manage to muster up some fury at the casual cruelty of the thing.
The world collapses. There is no future, and the present is purgatorial.
There is only an endlessly re-examined past.
A false life, full of false beliefs.
Squandered trust.
Abandoned vows.
“It’s a total loss,” the ontological adjuster says, in an imaginary voice only I can hear. “You don’t have the coverage for this.”
I have long-since inventoried my extensive catalog of faults. I have long since exhausted my supply of inward-focused blame. I did my share of wrongs, but the expenses aren’t all mine. Not even close.
The ledger does not balance by my accounting alone.
It was never good, except when it was. We fought like Montagues and Capulets, except for when we played Romeo and Juliet.
I don’t mourn the conflict, the difficulties, the tension or the cutting words. I mourn the truer, deeper thing I always believed lived beneath. The thing I was always reaching for. The one I thought, if we just focused our efforts the right way, could win.
A love worth fighting for, not about.
It’s been almost eight months now, since the worst night of my life. Eight months since I had to walk out that door, my babies crying, you angry, me feeling things I don’t even know how to put into words. It’s like a crime scene too horrible to look upon. Just the memory streaks my face with tears.
Nothing has been the same since. Life has lost any hint of promise. Despite the condolences and compassion of strangers from far away, there is no one here, in the real world, to ask for comfort. No shoulder nearby to cry upon. No trusted presence over coffee. No embrace from a warm body as they lie to me and tell me it will be OK.
The only life I ever hoped for is already dead and buried. I merely happen to continue breathing.
It’s like my body hasn’t fully accepted the news.
Memories come in a jumble. Images flash, faces and scenes, too elusive to view in detail. But some things stand out in the haze.
Your smile. You always complained that it was crooked, but it never failed to dazzle me.
The intensity of your eyes, as we stood entranced, gazing at each other in the golden light of evening in the parking lot, smiling like idiots, me refusing to get in my dark blue Pontiac station wagon, you hovering just beyond your cherry red Toyota convertible.
The smell of you on my shirt. The feeling of you jumping into my arms, squealing with delight. Your eager, hungry kiss, back in the days when affection wasn’t something I had to request and only begrudgingly receive…until there just wasn’t any at all.
You would look straight through me sometimes, shifting your tone into something like a melody when you would say my name. The sound of it, back when your mouth was soft and warm, not hard edged and sharp, dripping with contempt.
“I’m your ride or die,” you say, in another life not so long ago — a life where I was fool enough to believe it.
Numb, looking for something halfway productive to do, I organize old files on my computer, deleting, shifting folders, re-arranging the deck chairs on the sunken vessel of my life.
A video I don’t remember sits in a folder full of images of the children.
You and I, sitting together on a couch, me with a beard still more brown than gray, you with your hair cropped short. I lean back against your chest, smiling up at you, and you look down, smiling back at me. A moment of tenderness, trapped in amber.
The smile looks like you mean it.
“Was any of it ever real?” comes again. But who can answer?
And what if it was?
And what if it wasn’t?
Will anything change?
I pull on my hoodie against an unexpectedly chilly evening, slip outside to the concrete steps just beyond my door. I flip open a small slab of plastic and light up a smoke, the last cigarette from a pack I had no business buying, lungs burning as I flail towards yet another possibility of momentary relief.
I see you standing there, outside the tan door of the old brick rambler that was your mom’s place before they killed her, the vinyl window frames cracked and peeling from the relentless Arizona sun, taking a drag of your own, spitting your disgust into the dust.
You were like that sometimes. Choosing freely to do things you hated. Loving things you didn’t. You were always temperamental like a storm. I was drawn to your ferocity like a moth to a flame.
We stood there in the washed-out landscape, in a place we never wanted to be, a place you kept trying to leave, smoking, staring, poking the loose cinderblocks through the weeds with the toes of our shoes. It was one of a thousand hard times we’ve gone through, and we endured them however we could — together. The ritual of smoke pushed the desert back just a little, under the relentless heat and harsh light of a cloudless sky, blue so pale it almost bordered on white.
I want to go back, talk to the version of you who wanted me so much you couldn’t wait for me to put a ring on your finger. The one who convinced me to let down my guard. The one who hadn’t grown to loathe the man she swore she loved. The one who walked down that aisle, eyes brighter than your beautiful white dress, as we started something new.
Something I thought was as permanent as things in this life could ever be.
I knew in that moment, as you met me at the altar, that I was exactly where I belonged. I wasn’t afraid. I, the man who could second-guess the sunrise, had not even a trace of doubt. And that knowing, that certainty, turned out to be a lie.
How can I ever know anything again?
What is truth if it can be upended, worn through, or left with nowhere to land?
Where is the version of me who drove to the church that day, sweating in the July Virginia sun, dragging catering and just-altered tux to the parish hall to start a whole new life? Does he still exist? Did I abandon him there?
The silence closes in, and my own cigarette has burned down to the filter. There’s no reason to stay outside.
There’s no reason to do anything at all. It’s all just going through the motions. Wake. Cook. Eat. Work. Shower. Work. Clean. Cook. Eat. Drink. Watch television. Cry. Sleep. Repeat.
It’s been weeks since I’ve interacted with an actual flesh-and-blood human being in any way that was not transactional. A cash register here. A gas pump there. A repairman fixing a leak.
Am I still real?
If a man crushed under the weight of an amputated life falls in an empty room, does he make a sound?
“I’m already dead,” I say again, to no one. The walls don’t answer. The floor remains quiet as stone. “I don’t exist.”
Their silence gives consent.
Nobody calls to check on me except the debtors who remain unpaid. Not one person has visited in all this time. I wonder, like a forensic analyst, how long it would take for anyone to know if I died in my sleep, or slipped in the tub and cracked my head. One week? Two? Would it only happen when the neighbors notice the smell?
I keep shambling like a zombie through this world of desolation. I am immolated, but though I move crowds, no one ever sees the flame.
No one sees me at all.
I think often of my little ones — they were all little once, even the ones who no longer are — their bright eyes and soft faces and round cheeks, tiny bodies I can hoist easily into my big arms.
Arms that are empty now. Arms that ache from their absence.
They will bear the untold costs of this unchosen life, of a broken family and a father rarely ever seen, and I am shackled. I can offer no protection from what I do not control.
I am as powerless as they are. I would never have chosen to leave them this inheritance of broken dreams. How does a man come to terms with such unspeakable things? How does he write off the unjust suffering that afflicts those he’s supposed to shield?
Must I keep wandering in exile, knowing the futility of hoped-for recompense?
Must I keep waiting for the latent power of a missing God? A God who never once answered, in almost 23 years of “sacramental” marriage, after all the times we called upon him to save us from ourselves? And what power does he have, anyway? What could he fix, if he decided to break his infuriating silence? What would he do if he answered my unworthy prayers?
Some wounds cannot be mended. Some bones cannot be set. If God cannot make a rock so big that it cannot be moved, by the same logic, he cannot create love in a place where love has gone to die.
I wonder how far I am from the place where madness lies. Is there a map for that territory? Will I know when I have at last stumbled into its waiting arms?
Would it even matter if I did?
I have been unmade. There will be no kintsugi-comeback, no jagged cracks made whole with gold. I will live out my days as a mere handful of shards.
I would abandon myself to something, if there were somewhere true for my offering to be received.
But there are only ruins.
There are only ashes.
Not even embers yet remain.
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